*** The following is a paper I delivered at MLG-ICS 2014 on a panel titled "Discourses of Carbon Culture" with Bob Johnson and Jeff Diamanti (you can read Jeff's paper here www.analogouscity.com). This paper is also based on an entry I wrote for Fueling Culture: Politics, History, Energy edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (Fordham UP, in progress).***

Let me repeat, we
are dealing with a potentiality, the realization of which depends on prevailing
circumstances. The emergence of a new style is dependent on many external
influences; and there is also a double internal danger which, in the history of
literature, has often marked periods of transition. There may be reluctance, on
the one hand, to accept the logic of some new subject-matter; there may be a
timid hanging-on to traditional styles, an unwillingness to give up old habits.
There may also be, on the other hand, a tendency to overemphasize abstract aspects of new subject-matter
(‘in history,’ wrote Hegel, ‘every new phenomenon emerges first in abstract
form’). Abstraction thus gains the upper hand. Concrete realities—the
exploration with the help of the new consciousness of as yet unexplored subject
matter will be neglected or considered of secondary importance.—Georg Lukács, Realism in Our Time (1971: 115-116)

Lukács
disqualified the sciences as fetishes of the particular, unable to grasp the
totality, over which only the non-science of philosophy had dominion…But
climate science is not such a science. And curiously, it takes as its object
totality in a quite different sense: the totality of metabolic processes that take
place on a planetary scale, and in particular the contribution of collective
human labor to those processes.—McKenzie Wark, “Four Cheers for Vulgar Marxism”

In ecological
thought, thinking big is back in a big way. And why not? The twin problems of
global warming and ongoing pollution are both intensified by an energy-reliant
system of accumulation and dispossession that operates at a massive scale.
Thinking big seems to match the size of solution-seeking to the size of the
problem. In “The
Rise of Energy Humanities,”Dominic Boyer and
Imre Szeman frame this problem in terms of an ecology-energy impasse: “It
is not an exaggeration to ask whether human civilization has a future. Neither
technology nor policy can offer a silver-bullet solution to the environmental
effects created by an energy-hungry, rapidly modernizing and expanding global
population.”(Boyer and Szeman 2014). They posit that the
problems we face as a species fall within the expertise of the human sciences,
from studies of ethics, habits, and
values to
understandings of institutions, belief, and power. The discursive
mode arguably most interested in coming to terms with the scope of our
ecology-energy impasse is that of theory, with examples ranging from Eugene
Stoermer's and Paul Crutzen's theorizations of the Anthropocene, to Timothy
Morton’s attempt in Hyperobjects (2012)
to furnish a language suitable to both new materialism and what he calls the
“ecological emergency” (Morton 2012). But how do we begin to think between the proliferating big ideas of
geology, climate science, new materialism, and the energy humanities?

I would argue
that a particular risk in contemporary ecological theorizing is not the result
of trying to think too big; rather, it is a problem of taking too easy a path to
thinking that bigger picture. Totalities are nuanced, to say the least, and the
way we imagine social and ecological relations can be expressed only in complex
and indirect ways, lest we
fall back into what Hegel called “picture-thinking.” To avoid the pitfall
of mistaking the abstract whole for the sum of its concrete parts, I posit petrorealism – literary, cinematic, and gaming narrative forms, for
example – as a possible way to creatively mediate the scalar problem between
thinking big and the specific situations and contexts of petromodernity. I use Petro- because I think it is important to
conceive of all texts produced within petroculture as functionally marked by
the ontology of oil even as they anticipate a world after oil, and I use -realism because I aim to emphasize the
way its variants share an ability to mediate the variegated scales implied in
specific instances within a larger whole at once and, thus, better grasp the
energy-ecology impasse.

Petrorealism (or
its absence), for example, is what is really at stake in Amitav Ghosh’s seminal
essay “Petrofictions: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,” where he observes the
oil encounter does not produce an equivalently rich corpus of novels as the
spice encounter (Ghosh 1992: 138). Extending Ghosh's desire for big thinking,
in “Oil and the American Imaginary” Peter Hitchcock cleverly suggests that
sugar and coffee are two commodities that could also function analogously to
oil (Hitchcock 2010: 81). But if we understand Ghosh to be marking not merely a
paucity of fiction of the oil encounter, but also expressing a desire for
petrorealism, then these commodities are not so easily substituted for one
another. Attention to the formal strategies necessary to representing the oil
encounter would reveal that the scale of big thinking is itself among the
subjects of this fiction. Realism, in its varied forms and modes, has a
penchant for narrating structure without losing site of specificity. Indeed,
Abdulrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt
quintet (1984-1989) and Upton Sinclair’s Oil!
(1927) respectively fuel Ghosh’s and Hitchcock’s desire for a realistic
petrofiction. For Ghosh, the slow and careful details of Munif’s story make it
stand out: for instance, few of the oil developers from the US are named, and
instead are simply referred to as the Americans, one exception being Sinclair,
who leaps out from the page like oil gushing from a well because his obvious
namesake is the 20th century author. Hitchcock’s reading of Oil! attaches importance to Upton Sinclair’s
realistic portrayal of the beginnings of US oil production and dependence.
Hitchcock figures oil’s centrality to the American political and cultural
imaginary, placing Oil! and Paul
Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation There
Will Be Blood (2007) as bookends of America’s century. Hitchcock does
acknowledge, however, that oil's centrality manifests primarily in its in
invisibility: “it is oil’s saturation of the infrastructure of modernity that
paradoxically has placed a significant bar on its cultural representation”
(Hitchcock 2010: 81). Though oil’s ubiquity has seemed to keep it from being of
central focus, petrorealism could elaborate the near omnipresence of oil in
everyday life in an attempt to defamiliarize or to make strange our
petrosubjectivity.

As a materialism
term, petrorealism also has a polemic function: it offers an important
corrective to philosophical senses of thinking big that evacuate the subject
and any form of politics from its imaginations. The speculative realism of
philosophers Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin
Meillassoux contests our all-too-humanist claim that knowledge is ultimately
subjective, while silently opposing already existing materialisms, which, as
Wesley Phillips remarks, is notably strange when one considers their shared
preoccupation with realism (Philips 2012: 290). Contrasting new materialism
with historical materialism emphases a key difference between speculative
realism and what I am calling petrorealism: as Phillips explains speculative
realist philosophers share an understanding of “the real as the physical” (2012: 290), whereas I
argue that petrorealism maintains that the abstract, and not the only the
vulgarly physical, can be and is material. I do not want to suggest that the
desire to decenter the human and human consciousness from the world is invalid;
rather, I would suggest that by thinking along the lines of petrorealism, we
can begin to recognize speculative realism as a symptom of the vast, alienating
and thoroughly unhuman forces of oil-fueled capital accumulation. As Lukács
suggested in the “The Ideology of Modernism,” intention can be read into a
text, not as the author’s personal aim, but as the Weltanschauung or ideology of that author (Lukács 1971: 19). Thus,
we might say, the object oriented ontologist seeks to escape a situation of
their own making by subtracting the human from ecological questions and
preferring to speculate about the consciousness of the geological formations on
which human impacts have been wrought. No matter how one understands its
intention, the effect of this subtraction of the human is an evacuation of
politics. By contrast, Morton’s thinking about hyperobjects implies a politics:
as a collection of discrete yet like objects (all nuclear materials, or all plutonium,
or all uranium), or a place demarcated by a spatial imaginary (the Lago Agrio
oil field in Ecuador), or an entity all but invisible except for its effects (a
black hole), or a set of processes and relations (global capital) – a
hyperobject can be transcoded as another word for totality. Yet hyperobjects
still lack mediation – and thus with petrorealism,
I aim to restore mediation to its place in thought, human or otherwise,
especially big thought about the energy-ecology impasse.

Examples abound of
novels, films, documentaries, and other kinds of texts that outline what
petrorealism could be and do. Situated within distinct formal mechanics, the
following examples manage to think big without falling into the trap of picture
thinking, and are, at least provisionally, divided into five categories:

Maps of energy presents that do not foreground energy: Noel
Burch and Allan Sekula’s exploration of container ships and the global
circulation of commodities in The
Forgotten Space (2010), Max Brooks’s depiction
of social totality through circulation and exchange figured as contagion in World
War Z (2006), or Steven Soderbergh’s chart of global flows and
borders, whether figured through the drug trade or the spread of disease and
the development of vaccines, in Traffic
(2000) and Contagion (2011).

Postcolonial film and writing: in the recent
short film Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu 2010),
water sovereignty and labor as a clean energy source clash with the
protagonist’s discovery of uncontaminated soil. Jennifer Wenzel’s description
of petro-magic-realism in Ben Okri’s
story, “What the Tapster Saw,” combines “the transmogrifying creatures and
liminal space of the forest in Yoruba narrative tradition” and “the
monstrous-but-mundane violence of oil exploration and extraction, the state
violence that supports it, and the environmental degradation that it causes”
(Wenzel 2006: 456).

Science fiction energy futures: when Kim
Stanley Robinson discusses terraforming in the Mars Trilogy (1993,1994,1996) he shows that petrorealism need not
be only about oil, but should be able to hold together the complex of various
forms of energy, their scales, and temporalities.

Actual accounts of the petro-present: James Marriot
and Mika Minio-Paluello’s travelogue The
Oil Road: Journey from the Caspian Sea to the City of London (2012) maps
the oil present spatially, economically, and ecologically. Their figure of the
“oil road,” reviewer Adam Carlson notes, “gives us a powerful tool for
representing the totality, for seeing through the haze, to make sense of both
the physical Oil Road, and the Carbon Web – the political, social and economic,
the superstructure of the infrastructure” (Carlson 2013).

Interactive documentary and documentary/videogame hybrids: Offshore (Brenda Longfellow, Glen Richards,
and Helios Labs 2013) and Fort McMoney
(David Dufresne 2013)offer an
immersive petrorealism. The former depicts an oil rig modelled on the Deepwater Horizon, which viewers explore at their own pace and direction by
navigating an eerie maze of stations and compartments; in the latter, viewers
travel to Fort McMurray, Alberta and explore the town – they can follow bottle
collectors, visit the Oil Patch, and vote on important town issues.

Following these
examples, petrorealism does not operate in terms of longing for a return to a
time before oil. Instead, it follows Stephanie LeMenager’s (2012) insistence on
the irreversibility of petrocapitalism and looks to futures that take the
infrastructures and imaginaries of petromodernity into account, with ingenuity
and rigor. Petrorealism is, of necessity, an attempt come to terms with
petromodernity from within; indeed
there is no vantage from outside from which to write about its flows and
limits.

In Realism in Our Time (1971) Lukács makes
a useful distinction between the view critical realism had from outside
socialism versus the view socialist realism had from within it. As he points
out, despite enabling the critical realist to better grasp his or her own age
“it will not enable him [sic] to conceive the future from the inside” (Lukács 1971: 95). But this is precisely the task
before us. To quote another mid-century Marxist “Petroleum resists the five-act form,” and so we must embrace
the new styles and forms that resist petroleum! (Brecht 1977:29). My
hope is that by learning from petrorealism we might reach as close to the root
of the energy-ecology impasse as possible, drawing spatial connections between
capital’s energy demands and effects and the temporal possibilities of reaching
beyond our energy-dependant, growth-based system of social relations to a
future in which energy is no longer the metaphor or the cause for speculation,
but the actual driving force of our creative endeavors to overcome such crises.
By maintaining a moment of narration within the elaboration of a vaster
totality, petrorealism sharpens our focus on the task at hand: we must accept
the logic of the impasse without overemphasizing its abstract qualities. It is
here that the work of petrorealism stands revealed as a critical task to set
for ourselves as much as it is an already existing archive of material.